On Chickens, Cottonseed, and the Curious Case of Ashkenazi Ailments

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | No Comments

Jewish grandmothers. Those benevolent despots with the power to guilt-trip a scorpion into submission. Their cooking? Weaponized love in the form of brisket and blintzes, all bound together with liberal lashings of glistening schmaltz. Schmaltz, the rendered essence of a chicken’s corpulence, is the liquid gold of Ashkenazi cuisine. But schmaltz was a compromise forced on the Ashkenazi. There were no olive trees in northern Europe. Butter, that unctuous nectar of the Gentiles, was strictly off-limits to anyone trying to keep kosher. Lard – well, that’s a hard no, folks. Then there’s rendered beef fat. Good luck finding a reliable supply of that in the shtetls of 12th century Poland.  So chicken fat it was.

But schmaltz, like any precious resource, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. And for the Jews who fled pogroms and poverty in Eastern Europe to the tenements of turn-of-the-century New York, those laws were positively draconian. Picture, if you will, a pious Yiddishe mama attempting to raise a brood of chickens in a cramped Brooklyn apartment. Imagine the clucking, the feathers, the stench of kosher poultry mingling with tenement squalor… It’s a scene out of Kafka on acid.

No chickens meant no schmaltz, and that meant a culinary crisis for the Ashkenazi. This culinary pickle is where the good folks at Procter & Gamble, purveyors of fine soaps and industrial lubricants, seized their moment. Those corporate Einsteins realised that their newly concocted Crisco– a greasy, white brick of cotten-seed oil – could play the part of ersatz schmaltz. It was odourless, shelf-stable, and more importantly, pareve (i.e., neither meat nor dairy, and thus kosher-friendly).

Crisco became the manna of the masses. Rabbis were recruited to bless it, Yiddish cookbooks sang its praises, and before you could say “Oy vey!”, Jewish households were frying, basting, and baking with industrial zeal. Crisco was the culinary equivalent of Esperanto – a neutral zone where tradition met convenience, where Old World tastebuds could assimilate into the American melting pot.

But fate, that fickle mistress, had other plans. While Ashkenazi Jews were deep-frying their latkes in Ohio, a seismic shift was taking place. Israel was born, and with it, a wave of Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean and North Africa crashed onto its shores. These sun-kissed Semites didn’t know schmaltz from schmutz. Their culinary tradition revolved around olives and their blessed oil, a world away from the pale ghettos of Europe.

And – bless their healthy hearts! – It seems that their seed oil free diet might hold the key to a rather puzzling paradox: why is testicular cancer so staggeringly common among Ashkenazi Jews, yet virtually unheard of among their Sephardic brethren? Scientists mumble about genetics and other such nonsense, but could the answer be staring us in the face? Could it be as simple as ersatz schmaltz vs. olive oil?

The irony, of course, is delicious. Just as Crisco solved one culinary dilemma for the Ashkenazi, it may have unwittingly created another far darker problem. It’s a lesson in unintended consequences, and a sobering reminder that even the most seemingly innocuous of dietary choices can have echoes down the generations.

Seed Oil Deception: The Untold Story of How ‘Heart-Healthy’ Oils Can Harm Your Body

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 4 Comments

In a world where our choices dictate our health, a silent epidemic has been brewing – one that has gone largely unnoticed. It’s a story of the hidden dangers lurking in the most unsuspecting places, where the heroes and villains are anything but clear-cut. This is the story of seed oils and the biochemistry that connects them to the nefarious world of smoking and alcohol.

At the heart of this tale are yeast – single-celled organisms that make up the fungus kingdom. These microscopic creatures have mastered the art of survival, thriving by producing ethanol, a toxic byproduct that eliminates their competition. Ethanol, the same ingredient found in hand sanitizers and disinfectants, is also present in rotting fruits and vegetables, and it fuels our alcoholic beverages.

As humans, we’ve evolved defense mechanisms to deal with ethanol, starting with ADH, an enzyme that converts ethanol into acetaldehyde – a substance 30 times more toxic. But why would our bodies make such a counterintuitive move? The answer lies in time. By turning ethanol into acetaldehyde, we buy ourselves precious moments to convert the toxic substance into harmless acetic acid.

This delicate dance between ethanol and acetaldehyde has consequences. When acetaldehyde lingers in our system, it brings hangovers, nausea, and more severe health issues. Some people, particularly those of Northeast Asian descent, possess a genetic mutation that makes them more susceptible to the dangers of acetaldehyde. This “Asian Flush” may deter alcoholism but puts them at a higher risk for liver damage, dementia, and cancer.

The villainous aldehydes don’t stop at acetaldehyde. Our bodies also encounter acrolein, a cancer-causing compound produced when plants burn, such as in cigarette smoke. And then there’s 4-HNE, a lethal aldehyde derived from omega-6 polyunsaturated fats found in nuts, seeds, and legumes.

In the past, our consumption of omega-6 fats was limited. But with the rise of seed oils in the 19th and 20th centuries, we now consume over ten times the ancestral amounts. These oils, marketed as heart-healthy and endorsed by dietitians, have infiltrated our food supply.

From margarine to mayonnaise and even restaurant fryers, seed oils are inescapable. Our bodies create 4-HNE from these oils, but we also consume it directly when we cook with them, inhaling and ingesting a double dose of the toxic compound.

Like its aldehyde cousins, 4-HNE wreaks havoc on our DNA and proteins, leading to an array of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer. In a sinister twist, 4-HNE even undermines our genetic defenses against cancer.

While smoking and alcohol consumption are not marketed as healthy choices, seed oils have been cloaked in a veil of “heart-healthy” propaganda. The dangers of aldehydes produced by these oils far outweigh those from alcohol and smoking. The science behind this may be new, but it’s not so new that our health authorities should be unaware.

As this story unfolds, it’s clear that we can no longer afford to ignore the hidden dangers of seed oils. It’s time to reevaluate our relationship with these omnipresent substances and reconsider the choices we make in the name of health.

Aldehydes cause cancer. So why are health experts telling us to consume them?

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | One Comment

No-one would suggest smoking or drinking are good for us. But recently scientists have discovered the biochemistry of how they cause harm has a lot in common with seed oils. The difference is you get a choice about how and when you drink or smoke, but seed oils are now an inseparable component of the food supply and we are being actively encouraged to consume them.  Never before have so many been harmed by so few for so much money.

Yeast are single cell organisms which are part of the fungus kingdom. Like all organisms, their job is to win the replication game. Yeast win by killing the competition with their waste.  When they turn sugars into energy a by-product is ethanol, a substance which is lethal to most organisms. This is why it is a primary ingredient in Hand Sanitizer and disinfectants used to eliminate bacteria and viruses. Ethanol is also found in rotting fruit and vegetables and the active ingredient in alcoholic drinks.

Fruit is a naturally rich source of sugar, so as it rots, yeast produce more and more ethanol. Any animal that eats overripe or rotting fruit needs to have evolved a defence mechanism against poisonous ethanol.  In humans that defensive mechanism starts with ADH (Alcohol dehydrogenase), a group of enzymes which diffuse alcohol.

The ADH oxidizes ethanol into acetaldehyde, a Class 1 Carcinogen.  At first glance this is not the smartest thing to do.  Acetaldehyde is up to 30 times more toxic than ethanol. But we do it to buy time. The body diffuses an acutely toxic substance, ethanol, by turning it into a substance which while more toxic, takes longer to do harm. All being well, we use that extra time to oxidise the acetaldehyde to relatively harmless acetic acid (the primary ingredient in vinegar). We do that using ALDH (Acetaldehyde dehydrogenase) enzymes.

Acetaldehyde is the part of the process responsible for the consequences of alcohol abuse such as hangovers, nausea and ultimately liver damage and cancer. The longer it remains in our system, the worse and longer lasting those effects will be. We can however only process so much acetaldehyde at a time, so front loading the system by binge drinking means it stays with us for longer and does more harm.

For some people acetaldehyde can be even more dangerous. Up to 80% of people of Northeast Asian descent possess a mutation of ALDH which is less effective at diffusing Acetaldehyde.  This causes a condition nicknamed the “Asian Flush”. Their face goes red, they become nauseous, and their heart and respiration rates increase.  That reaction is sure to put you off the booze and the research shows people affected by Asian Flush are less likely to become alcoholics.

A similar logic is used with the drug Antabuse (disulfiram) which impairs ALDH, effectively causing Asian flush in people not otherwise affected.  It makes people less keen on drinking and is sold as a treatment for alcoholism.

The downside to Asian Flush and Antabuse induced Asian Flush is that it happens because it is slowing down the disposal of an extraordinarily toxic aldehyde. So while they are less likely to become alcoholics, these people are more likely to suffer the consequences of aldehyde exposure such as liver damage, dementia, and cancer.

Acetaldehyde is not the only aldehyde we are likely to encounter and it is not the only one that ALDH can deal with. It also diffuses Acrolein, one of the primary cancer-causing aldehydes created when plants are burned.  We are most likely to encounter acrolein in cigarette smoke but most smoke contains it. Even more importantly ALDH removes one of the most lethal carcinogenic aldehydes, 4-HNE.

4-Hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), first discovered in 1991, is created from omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. Nuts, seeds and legumes and the meat of animals that eat those things are the primary sources of omega-6 fats in the ancestral human diet.  Just as with limited ancestral alcohol and smoke exposure, our ALDH system has evolved to deal with the relatively small amounts of 4-HNE created by eating those foods.

But the modern diet contains a vast new source of those fats which dwarfs ancestral quantities, seed oils.  The invention and introduction of mass produced, cheap seed oils during the 19th and 20th centuries has resulted in the average person increasing their consumption of omega-6 fats more than 10 fold, well beyond any evolutionary limit.

Seed oils are extracted from seeds (such as Canola/Rapeseed, Sunflower, Safflower, Grape, Corn, Almond, Cotton, Hemp and Sesame) or legumes (such as Soy and Peanuts).  They all have one thing in common – very high levels of omega-6 fat. They are marketed as heart healthy vegetable oils and have received Dietitians’ seal of approval. This is why, since the 1990’s almost everything on the supermarket shelves contains it. And why everything cooked in a fryer in a restaurant or a burger ‘restaurant’ or a fish and chip shop is fried in it (although Maccas resisted Heart Foundation pressure until 2004 and KFC held out until 2012). Even the humble take-away sandwich is swimming in the stuff.  It is in the margarine smeared on the canola filled bread and the primary ingredient of the mayonnaise or most other dressings.

Our body creates 4-HNE from the seed oils we eat.  But that isn’t the only source. We directly consume it as well.  4-HNE is produced when food containing seed oils is cooked.  If we are nearby when it is cooking, we will inhale it directly. And if we then eat that food we are, in effect, receiving a double dose.

Just like acetaldehyde and acrolein, 4-HNE is dangerous because, when it exceeds our ability to remove it, it reacts with DNA and proteins that are critical components of our cells.  Accumulate enough damaged DNA or proteins and those cells begin to malfunction or die.  This is why 4-HNE has (so far) been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Heart Disease, Stroke, Type II Diabetes, Liver disease and almost every form of cancer.  It is so diabolical that when created or consumed in excess, it even alters the parts of our DNA which defend us against cancer.  It not only causes the attack but also disables the defence.

Messaging around smoking and the consumption of alcohol is clear.  They are not sold as health foods.  And it is up to us to choose how much of these substances we are exposed to.  ‘Heart Healthy’ Vegetable (really seed) oils are significantly more dangerous and yet have been relentlessly promoted by our peak health bodies ensuring they are everywhere in our food chain

Aldehydes produced by drinking and smoking are dangerous, but they are insignificant compared to those produced by consuming ‘heart healthy’ oils. The science on this is new but it is not so new that those we trust with our health should not be aware of it.  And yet, they continue to behave like sales agents for the seed oil industry.  This must stop now.

Don’t give kids sugar flavoured seed oil masquerading as Health Food

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | No Comments

Do you have a fussy eater? Are your kids refusing to eat their greens?  Worry no more, you should just give them a chocolate milkshake instead. Well, that’s what the makers of PediaSure would have you believe.  But is filling a kid with flour, sugar and seed oil really a better alternative to telling a kid to eat their greens for dinner or risk getting them for breakfast?

The latest Television Commercial for PediaSure shows a ‘busy kid’ playing basketball, riding his bike and sucking down a ‘delicious PediaSure health shake’ to ‘help support immunity, growth and a healthy appetite.’  The ad was in high rotation on Sunday night prime-time telly. The packaging looks a little like an infant formula tin but was clearly being sold as something active kids should be inhaling by the bucket-load. So what is it?

Here’s the ingredient list for vanilla PediaSure:

Hydrolysed corn starch, sucrose, PROTEIN (milk protein concentrate, soy protein isolate), VEGETABLE OIL (canola oil, high oleic sunflower oil, sunflower oil, medium chain triglycerides (MCT) oil), maltodextrin, MINERALS (potassium citrate, sodium citrate, calcium phosphate tribasic, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, potassium phosphate monobasic, calcium carbonate, potassium phosphate dibasic, sodium chloride, magnesium phosphate dibasic, ferrous sulfate, zinc sulfate, manganese sulfate, cupric sulfate, potassium iodide, chromium chloride, sodium selenite, sodium molybdate), oligofructose (FOS), EMULSIFIER (soy lecithin), flavoring, DHA from C. cohnii oil , choline chloride, VITAMINS (ascorbic acid, Vitamin E, niacinamide, calcium pantothenate, thiamin hydrochloride, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, Vitamin A palmitate, folic acid, phylloquinone, biotin, Vitamin D3, cyanocobalamin), ascorbyl palmitate, taurine, myo-inositol, carnitine tartrate, Lactobacillus acidophilus, mixed tocopherols

As delicious as that explosion in a chemical factory sounds, it boils down to garbage. Here’s my translation of the ingredient list (in descending order by calories supplied)

  1. Seed oil (35% of the calories)
  2. Pre-digested corn flour (for volume and ‘creaminess’ – also used in cosmetics) (30%)
  3. Table sugar (20%)
  4. Protein extracted from milk and soy (12%)
  5. Multi-vitamin
  6. Man-made soluble fibre
  7. Emulsifier (so the oil doesn’t layer out)

Yes, that’s right, this swill can summarised as Seed oil, Corn Flour and protein extracts with a serious dose of sugar to make sure the ‘busy kid’ will actually swallow it. It has a very similar make-up to so-called Toddler formula, the completely unnecessary marketing extension to actual infant formula. It also looks pretty similar to the shakes being sold to the elderly.

The omega-6 fats which dominate the seed oils are implicated in (at least) osteoporosismale infertilityrheumatoid arthritisParkinson’s diseaseallergies, asthmamacular degenerationimpaired intelligence and cancer. And the sugar will put the kid on track to an even more spectacular array of chronic diseases including Type II Diabetes, Kidney Disease, Fatty Liver Disease, Heart Disease, Erectile Dysfunction and Alzheimer’s.

This is all part of powder-creep. Baby formula is a, sometimes, vital food for infants who cannot be breast fed. But manufacturers are legally prohibited from filling infant formula with sugar and the margins are thin. If the manufacturers want to grow their revenue, they need new tummies to fill. So, we can expect more and more ‘nutritional supplements’ that look and taste like a milkshake but spouting dubious medical sounding benefits.

The reality is that a child in Australia today has about as much risk of being clinically undernourished as I do of being elected Pope. Yes, there are an exceedingly small number of Australian kids who could be considered at risk and they probably already have the support of a medical diagnosis and supervision.  So, let’s stop pretending that flogging this sugar flavoured seed oil on prime time TV is anything other than a cynical attempt to sell cornflour at a massive markup.  If you really want a kid to be well nourished give them a glass of milk or an egg.  Both are almost perfect foods from a human nutritional perspective.

Corn flour, sugar and seed oil will not boost the average kid’s immune system or help them grow (well at least not vertically).  PediaSure is no more a health food than the similarly composed seed oil and sugar effluent sold as Up&Go.  It should be avoided with just as much diligence. And under no circumstances should it be given to children.

Why the experts are wrong when they tell us cancer is our fault

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

The statistics tell us that every year more and more of us suffer from cancer.  The experts continue to tell us it is our fault for failing to listen to their sage advice. But with smoking and drinking at all-time lows and sun protection at levels never before seen in the history of life on earth, it’s time for the experts to admit that maybe, just maybe they have been horribly wrong.

This week the team at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute pumped out another of their tax payer funded three yearly updates on ‘modifiable’ risk factors for cancer.  After doing some mathematical acrobatics they calculate that if we just stopped doing risky things 38% of cancer deaths would be prevented.

The ‘risky things’ they are worried about are smoking, not eating enough fruit and vegetables, eating too much red meat, consuming too much alcohol, not exercising enough and spending too much time in the sun.

The only problem is that we have been doing all of that since at least the early eighties.  And over the intervening decades cancer incidences have been accelerating at a terrifying rate.

Between 1980 and 2012 we cut back on the booze – dropping our consumption by 21%. We also ate 15.4% more vegetables and 7.5% more fruit between 1992 and 2011.  And our consumption of beef has plummeted by half since the early eighties.

For good measure, we also increased the amount of exercise we did, with the proportion of us doing high levels of exercise almost doubling.  And our sun protection behaviours have improved significantly. Most importantly, we dramatically reduced smoking.  Adults who smoked daily almost halved between 1995 and 2015.

And our reward for doing exactly as we were told? The incidence of all cancers has increased by 23% and some cancers have really exploded.  Australians are now three times as likely to have thyroid or liver cancer and between 2 and 3 times as likely to have melanoma or Kidney, Anal, or prostate cancer.

We have done exactly what we were told and the result is the opposite of what the experts predicted.  And yet the advice from those experts is to do it harder.  On the evidence to date you could reasonably conclude doing what the experts tell us will likely increase the suffering from cancer.

We need these experts to take a harder look at what we know about the underlying causes of cancer and break from the career-preserving eat-more-veg-and-exercise-more tosh they have so far been dispensing.

In an environment when the solution you preach is not producing the result in you predict, then it is highly probably you are missing something.  Yes, smoking reductions have put downward pressure on lung cancer rates but it is also clear that something else is putting even more upward pressure on lung cancer and a long list of other cancers.

We know that smoking causes cancer because it releases large amount of toxic aldehydes into our system.  These drive a state of oxidative stress which cascades through to the DNA disruption which lies at the heart of cancer.

But we have known for decades that seed oils, the fats which now totally dominate our food supply, produce exactly the same disease cascades as smoking – only worse.

The science on this is the gold standard in nutrition research – a double-blind, randomized, controlled lengthy human trial. No correlations. No guessing about explanations. Just one dietary change which lead to just one powerful conclusion.

The trial was conducted in the late 1960s. It involved randomly allocating men to diets that contained animal fat (let’s call them the butter eaters) or diets where that fat was replaced with seed oils (the margarine eaters).

After eight years, the butter eaters had half the rate of death from cancer when compared to the margarine eaters. And that’s even though the butter eaters had a much higher proportion of heavy smokers. It’s that simple, use seed oils for fat and humans die much more frequently from cancer.

In Australia today it is impossible to buy processed food which uses animal fat. There is one simple reason for this. It’s cheaper. All our packaged food is infused with cheap seed oils rather than expensive animal fats and our consumption of those cancer causing oils has inexorably risen as a result.

Knowing this, the rise in cancer diagnosis, despite the huge reduction in smoking, is not a surprise. Rather it is the inevitable result of the profiteering ways of the processed food industry. And it will continue to rise for as long as we continue to consume these oils.

We know that ingesting seed oils or inhaling their vapours causes cancer with at least the same level of certainty as we have about smoking. And yet these same experts telling us to eat less red meat and more vegies actively encourage us to consume these lethal oils.

The sanctimonious preaching must stop. We don’t need yet another round of experts using our money to tell us cancer is our fault.  Cancer is not our fault. The science has told us for decades that it is caused by the very same seed oils that these experts tell us we should eat.  We need the high priests of nutrition science to immediately stop singing from the food industry song-sheet and provide evidence based advice about what really causes cancer.  If nothing changes, nothing will change.

How the Healthy Eating Guidelines have destroyed our health

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

The first Australian healthy eating guidelines were published in 1982.  Its now been 35 years since our government became worried enough about our health to start telling us what to eat.  There is now little doubt that it has been an unmitigated disaster.

The guidelines told us to eat more fruit and vegetables and less animal fat and salt, moderate our intake of sugar and alcohol and exercise more.

And we pretty much did as we were told.

We eat less fat and the fat we do eat is vegetable oil. Between 1982 and 2012 we dropped our total fat consumption by 25% but our animal fat consumption plummeted by an incredible 85%.

We now add salt to our food a third less frequently than we did in 1982. And Between 1992 and 2011, we increased our consumption of vegetables by 15.4%, and our fruit consumption by 7.5%.

We also exercise more.  In 1995, 30.2% of us performed moderate or high levels of exercise every week and in 2012 that had increased to 32.4% with the proportion doing high levels of exercise almost doubling.

Between 1980 and 2012 we also cut back on the booze, dropping our consumption by 21%.

The only guideline we appeared to ignore was the one about ‘moderating’ our sugar consumption.  Data on that is spongy due to the Australian Bureau of Statistics discontinuing its monitoring in 1995 but based on comparable data in the US, we are likely to have increased the amount of sugar we consume by about 20%

So how have the Guidelines gone?  Have they reduced chronic disease?  Have they improved health outcomes?  Are we all pictures of glowing good health after a third of a century of politician inspired, food industry sponsored, dietitian enforced eating advice?

Not so much.

Chronic disease is now killing us at rates which were unimaginable in the 1980s.  Here are some of the most egregious examples, but they are just the tip of the ice-berg.

Weight

In the early 1980s, Forty percent of us were overweight including 10% who were obese.

Thirty-five years later, we would kill to only have that kind of weight problem.  Now almost 70% of us are overweight and obesity has tripled.

The science tells us weight gain is caused by sugar’s unique ability to dysregulate our appetite control.

Type II Diabetes

In 1989, less than 1% of the Australian population had Type II Diabetes.  By 2015, that number had more than quadrupled (to 4.4%).  As a result, every day in Australia around 12 people will undergo a diabetes-related amputation.

Type II Diabetes is caused by consumption of sugar.

Kidney Disease

Chronic kidney disease is now responsible for more than 1 in every 6 hospitalisations. And that rate has gotten very bad, very quickly. Between 2001 and 2015, hospital admissions for kidney dialysis alone more than doubled.

Chronic kidney disease is caused by consumption of sugar

Cancer

The incidence of all cancers has increased by 23% but some cancers have exploded.  Australians are now three times as likely to have Thyroid or liver cancer and between 2 and 3 times as likely to have Kidney, Anal or prostate cancer or melanoma.

Cancer is caused by consumption of vegetable oils and its growth is accelerated by sugar.

Allergies

Reported rates of Hay Fever, Asthma and Eczema have doubled in the last 15 years according to survey data. Hosptilisation rates for the most extreme form of allergic reaction, Anaphylaxis (life threatening acute inflammation usually in response to food) also doubled between 1994 and 2005. And the biggest overall change has been a five-fold increase in anaphylaxis admissions for children aged 0 to 4 years (as compared to just double for the rest of the population). Five times as many admissions in just ten years.

Impaired inflammation responses like these are caused by consumption of vegetable oil.

Fertility

Around one in six Australian couples now meet the World Health Organisation definition of infertility and this is due in no small part to the alarming drop in male fertility.  Since the 1980s, male sperm counts have dropped by at least 30% and if the trend continues, fertile men will be as rare as hen’s teeth within two decades.

Male fertility is destroyed by consumption of vegetable oils.

Those we trusted with health advice told us to eat vegetable oils, focus on the fat and calorie content of foods and exercise more.  They also had scant concern for sugar.  The food industry paid attention and pushed the ‘healthy eating’ barrow as hard and fast as it could.

Our food was filled with vegetable oil and sugar and that was ok as long as it was ‘low in saturated fat’.  The dietetics industry merrily accepted the sponsorship of the food producers and sung uncritically from the same hymn sheet.

But now we see the grisly consequences of that gormless obsession with saturated fat unfolding before our eyes (provided they haven’t been destroyed by vegetable oil induced macular degeneration).

The evidence that sugar and vegetable oil is crippling us is now abundant, but those in charge of health advice refuse to act.  These same experts who have presided over three decades of culpably negligent public health advice, now refuse to either acknowledge their error or change their foolhardy ways.

That advice must change immediately.  We cannot afford to throw millions more of us under the bus driven by the egos of academics and fueled by the blood money of the processed food industry.

Why buy Viagra when you can roll your own?

By | Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 6 Comments

Viagra is a drug which helps us get more out of the nitric oxide we naturally produce.  Besides its highly successful commercial use, a recent trial has shown it could make a significant difference to heart disease patients.  But it won’t because – money.

Nitric Oxide is a highly reactive gas created naturally by lightning strikes and less naturally by car exhausts.  It’s also somewhat of a superstar in the biological world.  It was declared molecule of the year in 1992, has its own scientific journal and its own fan club, the Nitric Oxide Society.  And every year about 3,000 new studies about its properties are published.

Biochemists are obsessed by the stuff because it is critical to the way some of our fairly important bits work (brain heart, lungs, immune system, genitalia etc.).  Nitric Oxide is used as a signaling molecule.  It tells one part of our body that another part wants it to do something.  Because it is a gas and it decays within seconds of release it is perfect for the job.  It easily and quickly gets through cell membranes passes on the message and then disappears.  This means we don’t have to go to the bother of having all sorts of mechanisms to clean it up afterwards.

We produce it in loads of places in our body, but critically in the linings of our blood vessels.  The Nitric Oxide produced there seeps into the muscles surrounding them and tells them to relax.  When they relax the blood vessels become wider and blood pressure decreases.

We’ve known since shortly after it was discovered in 1846 that nitroglycerin (yes, the stuff that goes bang) helped a lot with heart disease.  But we didn’t know why until we discovered that when ingested it increases Nitric Oxide levels.  The chaps who made those connections picked up the Nobel prize for medicine in 1998.  Ironically that prize is funded by the estate of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the safe form of nitroglycerin.  He had heart disease and was prescribed nitroglycerine for it in the late 1800s.

During the 1990s researchers from Pfizer were beavering away on a new drug which helped Nitric Oxide work better.  They wanted to come up with a better way of lowering blood pressure than asking people to suck on explosives.  But when they got to human trial stage of their drug, Sildenafil, they discovered a very lucrative side effect.

The heart wasn’t the only place that Nitric Oxide increased blood flow.  It turned out that it was extraordinarily effective at temporarily fixing erectile dysfunction.   Needless to say, the market for what became Viagra was significantly more tempting than just another blood pressure med.  Financially it was a very good call.  Viagra quickly became a license to print about $2 billion a year for Pfizer.

Rather unsurprisingly a long term study released last year showed just what a good thing they were on.  The study followed 5,956 men with type II diabetes who were taking Viagra.  After almost 8 years, the study found that when compared to matched men not taking the pills, they were 5% less likely to die from anything, 38% less likely to have a heart attack and 15% less likely to die if they did have one.

The heart attack risk reduction makes every other anti-blood pressure or cholesterol lowering medication look like a placebo.  And the reduction in death after heart attack was roughly 8 times as effective as the next best option (a surgically inserted stent).  The Viagra was unbelievably effective and they weren’t even taking it for their health.

That is just one of the, now thousands of, studies on the power of Nitric Oxide.  We now know that if our ability to produce it is in anyway impaired then besides heart disease, we much more likely to also suffer from hypertension, preeclampsia, Type II Diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, and of course erectile dysfunction.  It also plays a part in our learning and long term memory and supercharges our immune system. Obviously then, being able to increase our ability to produce Nitric Oxide should be something we strive for.  Likewise it’s a really good idea to avoid things which impair it.

Besides explosives and Viagra, eating garlic or green leafy vegetables like spinach (yes, Pop-eye was right)or lettuce for example increases Nitric Oxide production.  Exercise and living at high altitudes also does the trick.  But none of that will matter in the least if you also consume fructose or omega-6 fat.

Cane sugar (sucrose) is one half glucose and one half fructose.  The fructose half is unique among sugars we eat in that our liver processes it to fat without any feedback or control.  It was so rare in our evolved environment (there were so few coke machines in Paleolithic times) that we never bothered to develop the capacity to regulate that process.

A waste product from converting fructose to fat is uric acid, a substance that we are very poorly evolved to deal with in the quantities produced when we eat sugar.  Unfortunately for us uric acid reacts with the nitric oxide we produce and disables it.

The omega-6 fats that dominate seed oils (canola, soybean, sunflower, grapeseed, rice-bran and cottonseed) produce highly reactive compounds.  Those compounds directly impair our ability to produce nitric oxide.

Our food supply is now stuffed with sugar and seed oils.  There is barely a product on the supermarket shelf that does not contain one or, more usually, both.  If your aim was to impair our production of nitric oxide you’d struggle to do better than create a food supply which looked like the average supermarket.

Given that, it is little wonder that we are now drowning in the flood of chronic diseases that flow automatically from impaired nitric oxide – heart disease, hypertension, preeclampsia, Type II Diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, dementia, communicable infections and of course erectile dysfunction.

Sadly Viagra is not an option.  It is not approved for use as a heart medication and never will be.  Pfizer will not spend the $100s of millions required to do the required trials now that it is off-patent.  That leaves us with just one solution and it is the same one as always.  Self-medicate with real food that contains neither sugar nor seed oils.

How fathers avoiding Vegetable Oil can prevent Childhood Cancer

By | Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

We know a smoking father damages sperm and seriously increases childhood cancer risk. But the vegetable oil in that tub of margarine or that splodge of mayo works the same way only many times worse.

Childhood cancers are defined as those diagnosed before the child turns 15.  Together, leukaemia (blood cell cancers), brain tumours and lymphomas account for more than two thirds of all childhood cancers, but leukaemia is by far the most common.

One in 500 Australian children will develop cancer.  That’s 2 new cases every day.  Two children every day!  That is one of the highest rates in the world and it is getting much worse very quickly. A child born in the UK in 1911 was six times less likely to suffer from leukemia than one born today. Australian statistics show identical trends.

The genetic damage that lies behind most childhood cancer is caused by oxidative damage to sperm DNA.  Oxidative stress produces highly toxic and reactive end products which attack the integrity of the DNA carried by sperm.  We normally deal with heavily disrupted cell DNA by repairing it or killing off the damaged cell.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case with sperm.  Human sperm sometimes retain the capacity for fertilization even when their DNA are severely damaged (and this is even more likely with modern assisted reproduction techniques).

We know this for certain because of studies done in men who smoke. Even though those studies have shown smokers are much less fertile than non-smokers, they are not always infertile. The sperm of smokers who remain fertile have DNA that has been damaged by oxidative stress.  This is caused by the inhalation of aldehydes which promote oxidation.

Because DNA-damaged sperm are still able to create viable embryos, the consequences can be cataclysmic.  We have known since at least 1997 that the children of fathers who smoke heavily are four to five times as likely to develop childhood cancers.

Intentionally inhaling toxic aldehydes by smoking is therefore obviously a bad idea for men thinking about having children.  But in the last 50 years Australia’s male smoking rates have been diving almost as fast as the rates of childhood cancer have been increasing.  Now less than 1 in 5 men smoke (down from 3 in 4 after WWII) and more than half have never smoked.

Smoking is clearly not the only source of toxic aldehydes in our environment. We also manufacture them ourselves if we consume too much Omega-6 polyunsaturated fat.  And we can be significantly exposed to them if we inhale the vapours from heating those fats.

These fats dominate oils extracted from seeds like Canola, Rice-Bran, Grapeseed, Sunflower and Almonds or legumes like peanuts and soybeans.  And we are eating too much of them (usually without even being aware of it) because these incredibly cheap oils dominate the 21st century food supply.  We now consume four times as much of these fats as we did a century ago.

If you purchase anything to eat, almost all the fat components will be these oils. The mayo on your takeaway sandwich will be made from sunflower oil, as will the margarine.  Anything fried will have been cooked in cottonseed or canola oil, no matter how flash the joint you purchased it from.  All the breads and other baked goods will have been made using seed oils and so will all the dressings, dips and sauces.

It is no surprise then that as oxidation fuel increases in the form of vegetable oil in our food, then so too will the rate of childhood cancers. If we do nothing about the presence of these fats in our food, we can expect to see the rate of those cancers continue to climb dramatically.

But there is a surprising lack of interest in the science of oxidation from those who campaign hardest on the issue of childhood cancers.  The Leukemia Foundation for example, raised $26 million dollars last year, spent $11 million doing so, put $8.5 million towards patient support and spent just over $2 million on research focused on cures.  It did not spend a cent on prevention.   The Childhood Cancer Institute raised $36 million, spent $7 million doing so, and spent $25 million on research focused on cures.  It did spend money on prevention but this was focused on finding drugs to stop cancer developing in the embryo.

A look through their websites quickly explains their focus.  As far as these organisations are concerned, we don’t know what causes childhood cancers.  But that is not the state of the evidence.  We know oxidative stress causes sperm DNA damage of the sort which results in childhood cancer.  We know that cigarette smoke induces the required state of oxidative stress by inhalation of toxic aldehydes.  And we know that consumption of seed oils does exactly the same thing only worse.

There is clearly an accelerating need for the patient care options funded by these charities.  But if we don’t want them to have twice as many customers in a decade, they need to focus of prevention as well.

When they have the national spotlight with something like ‘World’s Greatest Shave’ they need to do more than ask for money.  They need to do as Red Nose does and tell us how to reduce our risk of harm.

They need to tell us about the danger of seed oils and we need them to be campaigning hard to stop those substances being put in our food.  Until they do that they are no better than a band-aid on a cut that grows wider and deeper by the day.

Why vegetable oils are much more deadly than cigarettes.

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 24 Comments

Smoking and vegetable oils cause disease via exactly the same mechanism. We don’t force our children to smoke, so why are we forcing them to consume vegetable oils?

People who smoke are up to six times more likely to suffer from heart disease than non-smokers. So it should not be surprising that researchers have concluded that the significant reduction in smoking over the last 50 years has been a major driver behind the parallel reduction in heart disease rates. Though you might be surprised to discover that until very recently, scientists have had no idea why that might be.

Cancer accounts for less than a third of deaths attributable to smoking whereas heart disease and stroke accounts for almost half. Lung cancer is an obvious consequence of inhaling a cloud of chemicals intentionally. But figuring out how that might be related to ‘clogged arteries’ has been a little tricky. And it hasn’t been made any easier by a fundamental error in our understanding of heart disease.

If your base assumption is that dietary saturated fat clogs up the arteries and causes heart disease, then it’s hard to see how smoking would make the slightest bit of difference. But in the last 15 years that simplistic explanation has been turned on its head. Yes, the immediate cause is blockage, but that blockage is the result of a process of inflammation and immune responses, not because a lump of bacon fat got stuck.

We now know that heart disease is caused by oxidative stress provoking an immune response which starts as damage to the arteries and can ultimately end in heart disease. And thanks to a decade of significant research in the area, we know that chemicals contained in cigarette smoke directly cause exactly the required state of oxidation, inflammation and immune response. Specifically, those chemicals are α,β-unsaturated aldehydes (aldehydes for short).

It turns out that burning tobacco is a really excellent way to produce aldehydes in seriously dangerous quantities. And inhaling the smoke produced is an almost perfect way to get them into our bloodstream. Once aldehydes are in our body, the damage they can cause extends way beyond heart disease. They are powerfully toxic carcinogens as well and likely (via sperm mutation) to play a primary role in the development of childhood cancers.

This is why the US surgeon general found in 2006 that smoking impacts nearly ‘every organ of the body’ and that there is ‘no risk-free level of exposure’ to cigarette smoke (even if you aren’t the one doing the smoking).

But intentionally sucking in aldehydes from burning grass isn’t the only way to come across them, we can also make them ourselves if we have too much omega-6 polyunsaturated fat in our diet. Vegetable oil made from seeds (Canola, Sunflower, Corn, Safflower, Grapeseed, Rice Bran and Soybean for example) -seed oils – are very high in omega-6 fats. When we eat those fats they are incorporated into every cell membrane in our body and create a state of oxidative stress which results in the production of these highly toxic aldehydes.

Ironically, the Heart Foundation’s misguided understanding of how heart disease worked has led them to tell us to consume more of the very substance which we now know causes it and most of the cancers which now afflict us. These seed oils are exactly the substances that the Heart Foundation has been telling us to consume instead of ‘artery clogging’ saturated fats for the last five decades. And we have dutifully done as we are told.

McDonald’s for example switched from frying in Beef Fat to Canola oil in 2004 after incessant pressure from the Heart Foundation. And KFC followed suit in 2012. Seed oils are now the primary source of fat in almost all food on the supermarket shelf, at the local snack bar and served in every restaurant.

While the aldehydes we make ourselves (from consuming too much seed oil) are devastating enough, it is now becoming abundantly clear that we can make them even more dangerous than they already are. All we need to do is heat them before we eat them.

A study released late 2015 found that when oils containing Omega-6 fats are heated at a normal cooking temperature (of 180⁰C), they create significant quantities of aldehydes. And each time the oil was re-used the concentration increased massively. The study showed that by the fifth day of oil re-use it had 5 times the concentration of these chemicals that it had on the first (which was already alarmingly high).

This is why we are now seeing lung cancer (for example) affect large numbers of people who have never smoked but who do cook with seed oils. And it also likely to be the reason why, even though the average smoker now smokes much less than the average smoker in the 1960s, they are much more likely to die from smoking related diseases.

The science has converged on a single unifying truth. Many cancers and heart disease are caused by aldehydes. And whether we encounter them by smoking, inhaling other people’s smoke, inhaling vapours from food frying or by eating the food cooked with those seed oils, the damage is the same and it is devastating.

None of this is speculation. It well established science that is being ignored by those we trust to advise us about our health. They are happy to accept that exposing us to cigarette smoke will cause heart disease and cancer. They are even happy to accept that it is a major risk factor for childhood cancer in children who have never been exposed to smoke. But when science tells us that seed oils work by exactly the same mechanism, they tell us to consume more. They might as well force us and our kids to have a 3 pack a day habit – and offer us a light.

 

Image Credits: Risks from Smoking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Toxic Oils from The Telegraph.

 

How Big Food is using our health system as a marketing tool.

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 6 Comments

Nestle, Danone and others like them, use our health system as a tool for flogging cheap and addictive powdered milk products.  Regulators have clamped down on them doing it with baby formula, now it is time to stop them doing it to our elderly.

In the early 1970s Nestle decided to exploit mothers in developing countries.  The plan was to convince breastfeeding mothers that using Nestle formulas was healthier for their children than breastfeeding them.

Nestle had realized that many mothers in Africa, Asia and South America had a strong desire to imitate Western culture.  So they leveraged this by implying that formula was the modern way to feed babies.  Anything else was old fashioned and primitive.

The aggressive marketing was extraordinarily effective. Formula sales took off like a rocket (the market is now worth $25 billion a year) but so did the incidence of childhood diseases in the developing world.  Drinking water was often unsafe and mixing it with milk powder and sugar didn’t do anything to fix that.

Breastfeeding protected children from the vagaries of the local water supply.  It is also free and doesn’t drain critically important money away from families who can least afford to buy formula.  The cost often results in mothers using less powder than required to make the tin stretch further.  So even if the water is clean the child is undernourished.

Nestle’s aggressive marketing led, in 1977, to a worldwide boycott of Nestle’s products.  And as a result, in 1981, the World Health Organization (WHO) created guidelines on the marketing of formula, but to this day there are continual breaches in the developing world and many of the groups who started the boycott continue to fight against Nestle and others.

The message was equally effective with Australian mothers.  Manufacturers provided formula ‘donations’ to Hospital nurseries and in hospital promotions often delivered by healthcare workers. And it worked.  Breastfeeding in Australia fell to record low levels in the 1970s.  In 1972 just one in 20 children was breastfed for 12 months.

In 1992 the Australian government finally implemented a voluntary code (based on the WHO rules developed more than a decade earlier) which severely restricted the way infant formula could be marketed and include a requirement that mother’s be told breast is best in all marketing material.  Promotion cannot occur at all on healthcare facilities and healthcare workers cannot receive any form of inducement to promote the products.  If formula is donated to an institution, it can only be used for children who a doctor has determined requires formula.

The code is voluntary but all the major manufacturers has signed on and breastfeeding rates are now 6-fold what they were in 1972 (although they are still just a third of the WHO recommended level).  Even so, Nestle and others continue to circumvent the ban on marketing by advertising unregulated toddler milks with exactly the same packaging and branding as the infant formulas.

But that is just fiddling at the edges compared to the latest gold mine for medical formula reps – the elderly.

Doctors are rightly concerned that older people not suffer from under-nutrition. They take weight loss among the elderly very seriously and therein lies the opportunity for Nestle and others (such as Danone, the maker of the Fortisip range).  These companies actively markets the use of food supplements for elderly patients, whether they are losing weight or not.  Hospitals and dietitians are encouraged to use things like the Nestle Nutritional Assessment tool to assess the need for supplements. Using that tool it would be almost impossible not to be assessed as requiring supplementation.

These powdered milk concoctions are offered as drinks with (or even instead of) hospital meals and patients are provided with order forms (often by dietitians employed by the hospital) for discounted purchase after they are discharged.  The products themselves are usually just hideously overprice powdered milk, sugar and a multi-vitamin and sometimes a dab of seed oil just for good measure.

The ingredients are very similar to Up&Go except they can have loads more sugar and sometimes a pile of seed oil as well.

Fortisip Vanilla Ready to Drink Sustagen Hospital Powder UP&GO Vanilla Ice Ready to Drink
water, maltodextrin, milk protein, sucrose, vegetable oil (canola oil, sunflower oil), tri potassium citrate, emulsifier (soy lecithin), flavour, magnesium chloride, acidity regulator, tri calcium phosphate, carotenoids, choline chloride, calcium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, sodium L-ascorbate, ferrous lactate, zinc sulphate, colour, magnesium hydroxide, nicotinamide, retinyl acetate, copper gluconate, DL-α tocopheryl acetate, sodium selenite, manganese sulphate, calcium D-pantothenate, chromium chloride, D-biotin, cholecalciferol, thiamin hydrochloride, pterolylmonoglutamic acid, pyridoxine hydrochloride, cyanoccobalamin, sodium molybdate, riboflavin, sodium flouride, potassium iodide, phytomenadione Non Fat Milk Solids (63%), Corn Syrup Solids, Whole Milk Powder, Sugar, Minerals (Magnesium Hydrogen Phosphate, Ferric Pyrophosphate, Zinc Gluconate, Copper Gluconate, Manganese Sulphate, Sodium Molybdate, Chromium Trichloride, Sodium Selenite), Vitamins (C, E, Niacinamide, A, D3, B6, B1, B2, Folic Acid, K1, B12), Stabiliser (414), Flavour. water, skim milk powder, cane sugar, wheat maltodextrin, soy protein, vegetable oils (sunflower, canola), vegetable fibre, hi-maize™ starch, corn syrup solids, flavours, fructose, oat flour, mineral (calcium), acidity regulator (332), vegetable gums (460, 466, 407), stabiliser (452), salt, vitamins (C, niacin, A, B12, B6, B2, B1, folate).
Sugar: 13.3% Sugar: 45% Sugar: 7.6%
Polyunsaturated Fat: 2.8% Polyunsaturated fat: 0.8% Polyunsaturated Fat: 0.7%

The sugar in Sustagen had until May 2016, been glucose.  But then Nestle decided to ‘improve the nutritional profile’ by replacing the much of the glucose with cane sugar.  Effectively this means they replaced half the nutritionally harmless glucose with toxic fructose.  Yep, the same fructose that has been nailed as causing Type II diabetes, Obesity, Fatty Liver Disease and probably Alzheimer’s disease (just to name a few of its greatest hits).

I can’t see how introducing a confirmed source of chronic disease improves the nutritional profile (and they have refused to respond to my written requests for an explanation), but I can see how it improves the financial profile of Nestle.  Sustagen’s competition all use it.  Fructose is highly addictive, so products that contain it always sell better than products without it.  And since the aim of this game seems to be follow on sales after the patient leaves hospital, an addictive product would be a better choice. Commercially its a no-brainer.

The seed oils in many of these products cause cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s Disease osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis (just to name a few of the greatest hits). Seed oils are cheap as chips, so using them instead of milk fat increases the profit margin.  Another commercial no-brainer.

These products are being directly promoted and marketed to patients within our healthcare system, something which would be prohibited if they were infant formula.   Nobody, but especially not a sick elderly person, needs sugar and (often) seed oil, loaded milk powder.  Nestle and their mates were barred from using hospitals as a sales tool for infant formula and its time the same thing happened for this garbage as well.